


A Thousand Miles of Smoke and Water

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Emergency! (TV 1972)
Genre: Gen, Other, it's a pairing if you squint, paramedics are strange beings, this relationship is open to interpretation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:15:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22994560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: The heat in LA is brittle, thick, and holds you in its teeth.When you trust another man - another paramedic - with your life 48 hours a week, twenty minutes in a fire can turn into a thousand years.(written for xcourtney_chaoticx)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	A Thousand Miles of Smoke and Water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xcourtney_chaoticx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xcourtney_chaoticx/gifts).



When Bob was a kid, a real kid, just a little kid with a brush haircut and milk-tooth molars, his mom would open up the windows on summer nights just to let their apartment breathe, and he could hear the sirens down below. He could lie in bed and try to guess each one as it went by: police, or fire, or ambulance. Wasn't any paramedics, in those days, and the man behind the ambulance wheel might just as soon be the undertaker, and himself he might not know which til he got on scene.

When Bob was a kid, when he was Bobby, when he was Frank's kid brother, when he was Ed and Louise's son, two boys from his block went swimming in the Des Plaines river, under the hot, fat, shimmering August sun, but only one boy came back out again. Bob (Bobby) walked into a funeral parlor in his Sunday best, starch and a clip-on necktie and hair his mother fussed to flatten, and saw a dead boy lying still and ordinary, as if lulled by the soft weeping of grown-ups and the grinding wheeze of an industrial fan in the corner. Bobby walked up to the dead boy trying to work out what that meant: dead. There was something pale about the boy that he had only vaguely known, something missing, something too sweet and fine-spun about his stillness. 

A woman, who might have been the boy's mother (it was a room of bodies: of shuddering bodies in black suits and Sunday dresses, veils and whispers, grown-up bodies swaying and heaving like the cars of a freight train), bent and stroked the hair, the cheek, the hands. A woman looked down at him with shining eyes. Bob (Bobby, his cock's comb hair straying from its pomade bonds) touched the hand of the boy who wasn't, anymore, because his skin was cold, cold like a door in the morning, before the sun come out and woke up the streets and the buses and the world. Colder than the gentle face of the moon, colder than the comforting stars.

Wasn't any paramedics, back then, and Bob wonders sometimes if there had been, would there still be two boys and not one, would there be two boys grown to young men. Two boys gone to work, two boys gone to Vietnam, two boys come home and starting families. Two boys went swimming and one came back, and one had a painted cheek that felt like the bottom of a river.

Summer in Chicago was a season of sirens: police and fire and ambulance, and in the later afternoons when the storms rolled in you'd hear the tornado warnings go off, howling like something trapped and wounded, like something raging to get out.

It doesn't storm like that, in Los Angeles. Back home you'd go days of heat, days of swelter, the mercury all but busting out of the thermometer on the drugstore window. Drink Coca-Cola, said the fading metal, with the smiling lady on it, and boy you did, boy you drank it half-solid with ice. The heat would rise from the day to the night, from the pavement to the bricks to the El, all the way to the sky until at last God deemed it right to break, and the lightning split the world to pieces and the thunder might've cracked the foundations of the earth and rain came spilling out of the sky like Noah was building an ark on the shores of Lake Michigan. But the heat, here, is brittle and fierce, and holds you in its teeth.

When the rain comes, if it comes at all, it sneaks up on you, and all of a sudden the power's out and the cracked-concrete culvert they call a river here is a raging torrent, rolling fury down to the port, to the ocean, rolling fury like it wants to tear everything down, like a bad trip, like a schizophrenic throwing himself against the walls of a cramped house in a neighborhood of cramped houses and cramped alleys and bad, boiling summer madness.

They're in the throes of the heat, they're at the mercy of the mercury, and Bob's gone through two uniform shirts and Craig's gone through four, and Bob's thinking about asking dispatch to post them up at a landromat for a couple of hours cause he's running out of shirts before he's gonna run out of sweat to soak them in. They drink water like horses and no one at Station wants to cook, and Cap says the hell with it, popsicles for dinner, and Leroy says Cap they're gonna melt before we get to eat them and Cap says the hell with it, just throw them in a bowl and call it soup. Craig says, from the couch where he has wilted, ever so slightly, gaz-popsicle, and chuckles. Gaz-popsicle, like gazpacho, get it?

Parker says Brice made a joke, Cap, I'm gonna shove my whole head in the freezer and don't take me out til January.

Bob laughs, and laughs, and Craig smiles, and the tones go off for a structure fire, as if the whole of the basin isn't hot enough already, just gotta add a few more degrees.

Fire's like death, he thinks, while Craig drives. It ain't scary, or not. It's just there, like sky or sand, like birth or sleep. You're meant to be at least little scared of it, like all the things that'll kill you out in the wide world, but it's no sense to lose sleep over it. No sense but to be prepared, as Craig is always reminding him, in his sweetly bothersome way, you're a fireman, Bob, how can you forget to change your smoke-alarm batteries?

The structure fire's a house, or it was a house, but it isn't going to be one soon - it's a Craftsman, Bob thinks, and in his mind he sees the layout, in his mind he sees the timbers and the frame, he sees the insulation packed in the walls. He sees hollow-core doors and shag carpeting. He sees these things as he hitches up his SCBA. He sees Craig doing the same, and pats him on the shoulder and Craig pats him back and no one questions it, even if they see it they haven't questioned it for months now.

The sun is a murky eye in the west and the heat of the sky and the cement pushes them toward the house as the house breathes out smoke. There is no heat like fire: it's like being inside a body, like being inside a fever. Twenty minutes in and out: it's all you can stand. Twenty minutes, that's a whole mile walking, twenty minutes, that's nothing, that's an intermission at the drive-in, that's popcorn, that's a thousand years in black smoke.

Twenty minutes. Craig triple-checks his SCBA every morning every shift, and Bob does the same because why not, because he's close to Craig that way, he does it because Craig does it and once upon a time he just did it to make peace with his partner but he does it now because that peace is like water, that peace is like smoke-detector batteries and bullhead catfish on a barbecue grill.

When Bob comes out of the fire stumbling, slapping hands like a relay to send the next crew in - and 51 is there, and 8s, and 10s, a small army - he falls to his knees on the grass and breathes its sweet summer-cracked smell. Someone is wrangling the ambulance attendants to bring out paper cups and water and coolers full of ice and he'd shove his head right in but he thinks: what would Craig think, me shoving my sweaty, sooty face in everyone else's water?

What would Craig think?

He looks around and squints and doesn't see his partner. He shoves a man from 10s. You seen my partner, he says? You see Brice? The grimed face is blank. He walks among the kneeling rows: you seen my partner? You seen Craig? Roy DeSoto is crouched on the sidewalk, his ginger hair streaked in grime. You seen Brice, Roy?

Roy has always had that softly concerned face, an expression that seems at first too gentle for a fireman. He shakes his head. No, he says. No, he's not with you?

Now his heart is thumping. Now his heart is jumping. Now his muscles hurt, and the gauge on his SCBA is in the red, and twenty minutes is much too long. There's an army of firemen in the same beige and blackened coats, the same black helmets, breathing the same thick air. 

Cap, he says, Cap, you seen - 

There's a hand on his shoulder and a glimpse in his eye, and Craig is missing his glasses somewhere, what a stupid thing to think at first, Craig stares nearsighted at him and pats his arm again. Bob, he says. I've been looking for you.

His heart beats in his chest so loud his ribs feel like the rafters of a church. Oh god, he thinks, oh god. Craig's live and living and confused face. His myopic gaze he swipes with one gloved hand. 

"Aw, jeez, kid, don't do that - "

You forget yourself sometimes. Act like a probie, act like a person.

So he bites his glove off instead, and swipes the grime from under Craig's eye, and smudges it further. He wants to say: jesus, kid, don't scare me like that. 

But Craig puts a hand flat against his chest, so instead he lets his hand, of flesh and blood and fever, linger longer than it ought.


End file.
